Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) takes center stage in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) as a tool to amplify its signal by orders of magnitude through the transfer of polarization from electron to nuclear spins. In contrast to modern NMR and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) that extensively rely on pulses for spin manipulation in the time domain, the current mainstream DNP technology exclusively relies on monochromatic continuous wave (CW) irradiation. This study introduces arbitrary phase shaped pulses that constitute a train of coherent chirp pulses in the time domain at 200 GHz (7 Tesla) to dramatically enhance the saturation bandwidth and DNP performance compared to CW DNP, yielding up to 500-fold in NMR signal enhancements...

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), a technique in which the high electron spin polarization is transferred to surrounding nuclei via microwaves irradiation, equips solid state NMR spectroscopy with unprecedented sensitivity. The most commonly used polarization agents for DNP are nitroxide radicals. However, their applicability to inorganic materials is mostly limited to surface detection. Paramagnetic metal ions were recently introduced as alternatives for nitroxides. Doping inorganic solids with paramagnetic ions can be used to tune material properties and introduces endogenous DNP agents that can potentially provide sensitivity in the particles' bulk and surface...

The coherent spin dynamics of fluorine donor-bound electrons in ZnSe induced by pulsed optical excitation is studied in a perpendicular applied magnetic field. The Larmor precession frequency serves as a measure for the total magnetic field exerted onto the electron spins and, surprisingly, does not increase linearly with the applied field, but shows a step-like behavior with pronounced plateaus, given by multiples of the laser repetition rate. This discretization occurs by a feedback mechanism in which the electron spins polarize the nuclear spins, which in turn generate a local Overhauser field adjusting the total magnetic field accordingly...

We investigate a new time domain approach to dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), the frequency-swept integrated solid effect (FS-ISE), utilizing a high power, broadband 94 GHz (3.35 T) pulse EPR spectrometer. The bandwidth of the spectrometer enabled measurement of the DNP Zeeman frequency/field profile that revealed two dominant polarization mechanisms, the expected ISE, and a new mechanism the stretched solid effect (S2E). At 94 GHz, despite the limitations in the microwave chirp pulse length (10 μs) and the repetition rate (2 kHz), we obtained signal enhancements up ~70 for the S2E and ~50 for the ISE...

Actinide-Lanthanide Separation (ALSEP) has been a topic of interest in recent years as it has been shown to selectively extract problematic metals from spent nuclear fuel. However, the process suffers from slow kinetics prohibiting it from being applied to nuclear facilities. In effort to improve the process, many fundamental studies have been performed, but the majority have only focused on the thermodynamics of separation. Therefore, to understand the mechanism behind the ALSEP process, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were utilized to obtain the dynamics and solvation characteristics for an organic extractant, 2-ethylhexylphosphonic acid mono-2-ethylhexyl ester (HEHEHP)...

Nitroxide biradicals are very efficient polarizing agents in magic angle spinning (MAS) cross effect (CE) dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Many recently synthesized, new radicals show superior DNP-efficiency in organic solvents but suffer from insufficient solubility in water or glycerol/water for biological applications. We report DNP efficiencies for two new radicals, the particularly well-water soluble bcTol-M and cyolyl-TOTAPOL, and include a comparison with three known biradicals, TOTAPOL, bcTol, and AMUPol...

The combination of a pulsed supersonic slit-discharge source and single-mode difference frequency direct absorption infrared spectroscopy permit first high resolution infrared study of the iodomethyl (CH2 I) radical, with the CH2 I radical species generated in a slit jet Ne/He discharge and cooled to 16 K in the supersonic expansion. Dual laser beam detection and collisional collimation in the slit expansion yield sub-Doppler linewidths (60 MHz), an absolute frequency calibration of 13 MHz, and absorbance sensitivities within a factor of two of the shot-noise limit...

Cold shock proteins (Csps) are expressed at lower-than-optimum temperatures, and they function as RNA chaperones; however, no structural studies on psychrophilic Csps have been reported. Here, we aimed to investigate the structure and dynamics of the Csp of the psychrophile Colwellia psychrerythraea 34H, ( Cp-Csp). Although Cp-Csp shares sequence homology, common folding patterns, and motifs-including a five β-stranded barrel-with its thermophilic counterparts, its thermostability (37 °C) was markedly lower than those of other Csps...

The ability to optically initialize the electronic spin of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has long been considered a valuable resource to enhance the polarization of neighboring nuclei, but efficient polarization transfer to spin species outside the diamond crystal has proven challenging. Here we demonstrate variable-magnetic-field, microwave-enabled cross-polarization from the NV electronic spin to protons in a model viscous fluid in contact with the diamond surface. Further, slight changes in the cross-relaxation rate as a function of the wait time between successive repetitions of the transfer protocol suggest slower molecular dynamics near the diamond surface compared to that in bulk...

Dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) has recently gained attention as a method to enhance the sensitivity of liquid NMR spectroscopy and MRI. Here, we demonstrate dissolution of the sample hyperpolarized by DNP using photoexcited triplet electrons in 0.38 T at room temperature. The achieved polarization of 0.8% is 6100 times as high as that at thermal equilibrium in the condition. The result is an important step for DNP using photoexcited triplet electrons to become widely used in chemical and biomedical research...

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) can be applied to enhance the sensitivity of solid-state NMR experiments by several orders of magnitude due to microwave-driven transfer of spin polarization from unpaired electrons to nuclei. While the underlying quantum mechanical aspects are sufficiently well understood on a microscopic level, the exact description of the large-scale spin dynamics, usually involving hundreds to thousands of nuclear spins per electron, is still lacking consensus. Generally, it is assumed that nuclear hyperpolarization can only be observed on nuclei which do not experience strong influence of the unpaired electrons and thus being significantly removed from the paramagnetic polarizing agents...

The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway plays a significant role in the control of osteoblastogenesis and bone formation. CXXC finger protein 5 (CXXC5) has been recently identified as a negative feedback regulator of osteoblast differentiation through a specific interaction with Dishevelled (Dvl) protein. It was reported that targeting the Dvl-CXXC5 interaction could be a novel anabolic therapeutic target for osteoporosis. In this study, complex structure of Dvl PDZ domain and CXXC5 peptide was simulated with molecular dynamics (MD)...

Paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) conjoint with hyperpolarized NMR reveals structural information on the enzyme-product complex in an on-going metalloenzyme catalyzed reaction. Substrates of pseudouridine monophosphate glycosidase are hyperpolarized using the dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) method. Time series of13 C NMR spectra are subsequently measured with the enzyme containing diamagnetic Mg2+ or paramagnetic Mn2+ ions in the active site. The differences of the signal evolution and line widths in the Mg2+ vs...

Nuclear hyperpolarization in liquid state by dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) has been of great interest because of its potential use in NMR spectroscopy of small samples of biological and chemical compounds in aqueous media. Liquid state DNP generally requires microwave resonators in order to generate an alternating magnetic field strong enough to saturate electron spins in the solution. As a consequence, the sample size is limited to dimensions of the order of the wavelength, and this restricts the sample volume to less than 100 nL for DNP at 9 T (~ 260 GHz)...

A paramount feature of robust experimental methods is acquiring consistent data. However, in dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), it has been observed that the DNP-induced NMR signal enhancement of nominally the same sample can vary between different experimental sessions. We investigated the impact of various freezing conditions on the DNP results for a standard sample, a 50/40/10 by volume d8-glycerol/D2O/H2O solution of 40 mM 4-amino TEMPO, and found that annealing the samples 10 K above the glass transition temperature (Tg) causes significant changes to the DNP profiles and enhancements compared to that in rapidly frozen samples...

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) has the potential to enhance the sensitivity of magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR by many orders of magnitude and therefore to revolutionize atomic resolution structural analysis. Currently, the most widely used approach to DNP for studies of chemical, material, and biological systems involves the cross-effect (CE) mechanism, which relies on biradicals as polarizing agents. However, at high magnetic fields (≥5 T), the best biradicals used for CE MAS-DNP are still far from optimal, primarily because of the nuclear depolarization effects they induce...